• http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2011/11/06/persistent-touchpad-configuration-in-ubuntu-11-10/

• http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1538147.html

But sometimes it makes sense to look at your own system's documentation:

% cd /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d
% head 50-synaptics.conf
# Example xorg.conf.d snippet that assigns the touchpad driver
# to all touchpads. See xorg.conf.d(5) for more information on
# InputClass.
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE, your distribution will likely overwrite
# it when updating. Copy (and rename) this file into
# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d first.
# Additional options may be added in the form of
#   Option "OptionName" "value"
#
Section "InputClass"

Which seems pretty obvious to me. I added

Option "TabButton2" "3"
Option "TabButton3" "2"

as my personal configuration.

pandoc2rfc *.mkd    # or a few other extensions

The shell script depends on transform.xsl to be installed in /usr/lib/pandoc2rfc/, allthough this can be overridden with a flag. When pandoc2rfc is installed you don't have carry the supports scripts inside your I-D's source repo. My pandoc2rfc I-D source directory now only has: template.xml, abstract.pdc, back.pdc, middle.pdc and a bib/ directory with references.

Debian packages

As said there are now debian packages, see below on the setup. If you are finished you can install the pandoc2rfc and xml2rfc combo with:

sudo apt-get install python-xml2rfc pandoc2rfc

I'm still learning this create-deb-and-upload stuff, so some breakage might be expected....

With the help of Marc Petit-Huguenin I have access to a debian infra structure over at pandoc2rfc.implementers.org

Here's what you should probably put in your: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pandoc2rfc.list:

deb http://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ testing/$(ARCH)/
deb http://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ testing/all/
deb http://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ stable/$(ARCH)/
deb http://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ stable/all/
deb-src http://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ testing/source/
deb-src http://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ stable/source/

Note that if the apt-transport-https package is installed then I recommend to use https instead:

deb https://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ testing/$(ARCH)/
deb https://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ testing/all/
deb https://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ stable/$(ARCH)/
deb https://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ stable/all/
deb-src https://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ testing/source/
deb-src https://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/ stable/source/

All the packages are automatically signed, you can install the public key like this:

wget https://pandoc2rfc.implementers.org/config/key.asc
sudo apt-key add key.asc

The fingerprint of the key is as follow:

CDB3 BC52 DFDC 8A58 35F1 714D 0309 943D 9AD0 8F3F

Download this vim syntax file and drop it in ~/.vim/syntax. It adds newer (DNSSEC) types and base64 highlighting. Base64 only works when there are no embedded spaces (patch welcome to fix that btw!)

Jul  1 01:59:59 elektron kernel: [183728.001601] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

Results in:

The plugin monitors both v6, v4, tcp and udp and plots them together, as send and received. Just symlink the port number to the plugin:

ip_port_123 -> ip_port_

For it to work, you do need some iptables rules, so yes, this plugin only works in Linux. See the munin plugin for the documentation.

Obligatory screenshot:

For now I took a shortcut and disabled the power management on the wlan0 interface. For this to work I created a (super)small script: /etc/network/if-up.d/wifipower:

#!/bin/sh -e
case $IFACE in
    wlan0) /sbin/iwconfig "$IFACE" power off ;;
esac

This keeping in sync hasn't worked out, so I wrote this little script to convert the vim colors to the gvim ones:

Download the makegvim script, and use it like:

$ ./makegvim < ~/.vim/colors/<yourfile> > /tmp/x
$ mv /tmp/x ~/.vim/colors/<yourfile>

And now the colors of gvim should be identical to those of vim.

Note: colors like 000 must be used like cterm=0 otherwise the conversion fails (the script isn't that smart).

But how do you merge a commit from a forked git repository? Turns out it is not that difficult.

The commit I want has the hash 5a11e88ddbef4ce7513aae93bdcd377449f45efb.

The steps:

• Create a remote branch:

  git remote add hamnis https://github.com/hamnis/pandoc2rfc
  

• Fetch the contents of it:

  git fetch hamnis
  

• Cherry-pick the commit you need:

  git cherry-pick -c 5a11e88ddbef4ce7513aae93bdcd377449f45efb
  [master 7501f13] transform.xsl: Supporting the output from pandoc 1.8.2.1:  
  * table/title 
  instead of table/caption  
  * table/tgroup/thead/row/entry instead of table/thead/tr/th  
  * table/tgroup/tbody/row/entry instead of table/tbody/tr/td
   Author: Trygve Laugstøl <trygvis@inamo.no>
   1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
  

Voila.

I like to think of people going to IETFs as tinkerers: they want to develop new protocols or make existing ones better. I would say perfect Linux users!

But no, most of them prefer Mac OS X, why? Because "it just works". And this is true. If you use Linux on a laptop you will probably need to fiddle a little to get everything working. On Mac OS X this isn't the case, it will just work.

Why do I still prefer Linux? Because it has thought me everything I know about computers. Especially in the old days, it needed a lot of hand holding to get boring things like sound working. I want to stay sharp, on the edge and get to know (new) stuff. I want to run a mailer daemon on my server, I want to play with new code. I want to get distracted and sometimes I'm forced to get my hands dirty and figure out how PulseAudio works. This takes, but, you will always learn something new.

If "Mail App" grinds away on the CPU and takes the load up to 100% you're stuck. If "mutt" has such a problem (if ever!), I can probably fix this.

And this is the crux of the matter... How can it be that people who want to tinker with stuff be content with a platform which is specifically designed to prevent tinkering?

I'm convinced Ubuntu can deliver the same user experience as Apple, but with 100% open source software.

Keep on tinkering!

Related reading

• The personal computer is dead

• vim (see that previous post);
• mutt (idem);
• zsh;
• dircolors;
• git (a bit).

zsh

See this file to setup the colors. Then in my prompt I have stuff like:

PS1=$'${vcs_info_msg_0_}$FG[067]%(1j.$myjobs% $FX[reset].$FX[reset])$FG[179]%#$FX[reset] '
RPS1="$RPSL%$MAXMID<...<$mypath$RPSR$FG[239]$FX[bold]$__ZH$FX[reset]${vcs_info_msg_1_}"
RPSR=$'$FX[reset]$FG[009]%(0?.$FG[reset]. $E)$FX[reset]'

For zsh I have two files that make up my prompt:

• zprompt, primary prompt setup;
• zvcs, version control vcs_info stuff.

Also see this older blog post on this setup. This leads to a prompt looking like this (click for larger):

The normal prompt is very plain. Almost nothing is shown, left the prompt % and on the right the PWD ~:

When logging in to a remote server, the hostname appears on the right:

When a program ends abnormally the exitcode is shown, in words (-INT) and red when it isn't zero:

When you background an app. the number of bg jobs appear in blue. The one with the + is the current job. Multiple jobs are separated with commas:

When you enter a git/svn/hg directory, the right side shows the type (git, svn, hg) and on the left you get the current branch.

dircolors

Modified from Solarized, not quite finished, but certainly looks nice (IMHO). See this dircolors file, I use it like:

eval $(dircolors ./dircolors)

git

The alias section from my .gitconfig:

[alias]
        st = status
        ci = commit
        br = branch
        co = checkout
        df = diff
        lg = log -p
        pl = pull
        ps = push
        timeline = log --graph \"--pretty=format:%C(192)%h%Creset by %C(bold 239)%an%Creset (%ar)%C(182)%d%Creset%n%s%n%b\" --all

The colors are selected with %C(number).